F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once said, "There are no second acts in American lives," probably wouldn't know what to make of Craig Kilborn. After all, the 47-year-old Minnesota native is about to start his fourth act. The lanky ex-host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and CBS' "The Late Late Show" returns to television with "The Kilborn File," a topical half-hour talk and comedy show that debuts at 6:30 p.m. Monday on Fox's KTTV-TV Channel 11....

Timothy Hutton will portray F. Scott Fitzgerald and Natasha Richardson will play his wife in "Zelda," a TV movie that the TNT cable channel expects to debut later this year. The film will chronicle the couple's high living during the 1920s and her breakdown in the years that followed.

I just can't wait to see "The Prisoner of Zelda" (Movie Listings, July 30). Don't tell me, let me guess. A swashbuckling zendup of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night"? ARTHUR LONDON Malibu Was the prisoner Dobie Gillis or Maynard G. Krebs? Will you be contacting Assemblywoman Sheila J. Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) for research assistance? PAUL YOUNG El Segundo

James Joyce's "Ulysses," the epic story about one man's journey during a single day in Dublin, Ireland, has been unanimously selected by a panel of scholars and writers as the best English-language novel of the century. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" was second, and Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was third. The selections by the Modern Library's editorial board in New York were generally older, recognized classics.

If Deanne Stillman ("Cairo by the Mohave," Guest Bites Town, May 10) wants to do a brilliant, ironic, erudite, warmed-over takeoff on Aldoux Huxley and F. Scott Fitzgerald, why doesn't she skip the comparisons to Rome and Cairo and visit Athens. It's an unincorporated area just south and east of Inglewood, not too far from Watts. Not just now, though. They're a little impatient at present with ancient history. FRED SCIFERS Downey

In the 1930s, women who dared to dye their hair often left the beauty shop with violent headaches, swollen eyelids and blisters on their foreheads. A decade later, the picture wasn't much prettier. "We used to make these diabolical bleaches, mixing 20-volume peroxide in a bowl with three drops of ammonia," Vidal Sassoon told Vogue a few years ago. "The number had to be exact, and I was terrified my hand would shake--it was as primitive as that."

I read with great enthusiasm Sergio Ortiz's article, "New Orleans, They Wrote" (Sept. 24), particularly a five-paragraph reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald. As both a writer of New Orleans and ardent scholar of Fitzgerald, I thought that in Ortiz I had somehow run across an undiscovered gem of "Fitzgeraldia." However, upon returning to my sources, I find no mention of any stint in New Orleans "while revising the galleys of his first novel 'This Side of Paradise.' " The entire affair is placed by all sources (including Fitzgerald's own essay "Early Success")